Miller:  (Laughs). No, I don't have any more right now; I'm sure some will come to me.

CW:  I was wondering what inspired you to come up with those. Is it Discovery Channel viewing?

Miller:  It is! I'm an Animal Planet/Discovery Channel junkie. I don't have cable in the house, but when I'm in a hotel or something I just get stuck on those channels. The great thing is that they feel like a documentary. You know, I went to a movie place last night and came home with three documentaries that were boring animal stuff, so yes, I'm just a junkie.

CW:  Speaking of nature, did you consider using some of your co-author John's landscape photography for the book cover?

Miller:  You know, we didn't just because it wouldn't have made sense with the title of the book. It would have made sense inside the book to show some of John's photography.

CW:  So instead, you went with this, um, very interesting orange-tinted photograph of what I take to be a man's lips and beard. Who is this and why use this picture?

Miller:  It's really funny, I get this question an awful lot since the book came out. I don't know who it is; it's just a stock photo and it was one of those things where we had gone through probably seven or eight covers trying to figure out what the cover should be, and we came across this one. We were literally sitting in a restaurant in Portland with about four or five covers lying on the table, and we asked the waitress to pick one. The one you see is the one she picked. But I like it, it's sort of rough, and really I wanted the book to appeal to guys who were in prison.

CW:  Don, is there anything about "To Own a Dragon" that you're just waiting for somebody to ask you that you haven't gotten a chance to talk about yet?

Miller:  That's a terrific question, but no, there isn't. I'm a pretty open guy, so I just tend to do it all in the book and I tend to forget that I've spilled it all there. Thanks for asking, though. I just really appreciate that you would be interested in what I wrote, that means a lot.

CW:  In closing, I'd like to ask you to pick a number between 1 and 12 and we'll finish with a random query from The Book of Questions, get to know you a bit.

Miller:  Let's do 12.

CW:  Number 12 … "What are" - and feel free to "no comment" me on this - "your most compulsive habits and do you regularly struggle to break these habits?"

Miller:  Oh, yeah ... compulsive habits. The most compulsive habit is food. I tend to write about it sometimes. It's such a weird topic in our culture that some people have mixed emotions about it. I actually lost about 90 pounds in the last two years.

CW:  Oh my goodness, congratulations.

Miller:  I've got about that much more to go, but yeah, it would be food. For Lent, I gave up Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. People laugh at that. Hey, man, I'm dead serious.

CW:  Amen. It's a sacrifice.

Miller:  It's a big deal. That's the big one. I'm getting a lot better at it.

 
To Own a Dragon released in February 2006 from NavPress.

Donald Miller  is the founding director of The Belmont Foundation - an organization assisting single mothers and children growing up without fathers. He is author of the bestselling "Blue Like Jazz", "Searching for God Knows What", and "Through Painted Deserts." He travels extensively around North America as a popular conference and college speaker and lives in Portland, Oregon.